I think that Google does not always credit the right version of the document as the original one. Even when the original was indexed first. I have 2 sites where I have similar content. Site A had all the content first and was live for a few months before site B. On site B I rewrote all the articles so they were "original", though they don't all pass the copyscape.com test. There is enough duplication in some of them for copyscape to pick them up as similar. All pages were indexed for Site A and many pages had top 5 rankings for their main terms. Then I launched site B and a couple months later all site A's pages went into supplemental index and now site B's pages have top rankings for those very same terms. Actually I don't mind. I would prefer site B to have the rankings, anyways. But I would actually prefer if they both had the page 1 rankings. Now, i was selling links on Site A and I may have linked to some not so great sites with poor link profiles. That may have killed site A's trust factor and could be the main reason for supplemental punishment. (pure speculation ) It also seems that Google has dropped all record of any backlinks pointing to site A, not all, it shows 4 in webmaster tools, when in Yahoo there is 500+. Webmaster tools used to show many more. Site B shows 200 at Yahoo and 285 in Google Webnaster tools. weirdness.
Its not really about the amount of links a site has but the date of publishing, its like saying "i was here first" in google for dup-content penalty, so if you came first and got indexed at the right time then yea you will have the upper hand obviously. Thats how google works.
Yea but all search engines have this law where if you report a site of copy infringement, they remove their listing.
Weird. Here is a possible explaination: If part of the content on site A is shown on site B and another part on site C and another part on site D, then Google could assume that site A stole it from B,C and D. I mean its more likely that someone steals from multiple sources then multiple sources all stealing from one. But since noone knows how their algo works its all speculative.
That's the way people like to say it works, but not the way google actually works. It just takes a few months, and you'll see that what I say is true. Try taking a page on your website, and put the same exact info on EzineArticles and see which one ends up in the supplemental index after 3-4 months. M
But that wouldn't really prove what you are saying. I think a lot of you are too hung up on the "duplicate content penalty." You assume that the results you are seeing have a correlation, but in reality you cannot be certain of this. Google doesn't expect every page on the net to be unique. The republishing of content and media DOES occur NATURALLY, and is necessary for distribution etc. There are over 100 different possible reasons why what Axemedia described, happened. Maybe Google knows the sites are both yours (google checks whois), and decided to use B due to something completely different it didn't like about A. Considering some of the BLATANT and RIDICULOUS duplicate content i have seen indexed, i seriously doubt what Axemedia described HAd ANYTHING to do with a "duplicate content penalty" Take for example the McClatchy news sites. They own all the major city newspaper domains. Charlotte.com, TheState.com, etc. All these sites have each others home page content in a subdirectory. All are indexed, all have PR, and none are sup results. And these are EXACT copies of the site. They have recently taken alot of these down, but you can see they have PR and are still indexed. This was recent, so check archive.org if you want more proof. An example I found that still exists are http://www.realcities.com/mld/charlotte and http://www.charlotte.com Also notice that http://www.charlotte.com, http://www.thecharlotteobserver.com, and http://www.charlotteobserver.com are all the same site, all have PR, all are indexed and are not sups. Even the non www versions all have these attributes! Still think Axemedia's experience had anything to do with "duplicate content"?
Yes, I do suspect there is more than a "duplicate content penalty" going on here. Just don't know exactly what the problem is. DavidK1 - RedDoor is nice!
Supplemental is not all caused by duplicate content. Backlinks can really help much more than unique content. If you want some of your pages to get out of supplement index, then get some links pointing to those pages.
thanks can you expand any more on why you think so? any comments on the more blatant and unpenalized examples I gave? Are the sites on the same server? do they have the same nameservers? is the contanct info the same? I wish I could show you another blatant example, and tell you some "weirdness" i have seen first hand. But it seems they have now fixed the problem. A competitor site had 3 domains all with the exact same site. Google had all 3 domains indexed, all had PR, and they would swap back and forth on the #4 spot for lingerie which is crazy volume. You can see this fix happened just recently, because the other 2 domains are still cached. Check out 3wishes.com, threewishes.com, and threewisheslingerie.com One day you'd see threewishes.com in the #4 spot, other days it was 3wishes.com. And on those days it was 3wishes.com in the 4 spot for lingerie, you'd see threewisheslingerie.com in the top 5 for sexy lingerie. Google had to be aware those sites were the same.
umm.... what makes you say that? i think duplicate content is a big factor in supplemental results. We just launched a new site that uses x-cart, which out of the box is very bad for seo. If you do a search for pages indexed site:www.madamleather.com, you will see the sup results are all pages that had similar titles and descriptions, and no copy. Another thread I saw tonight had the same issue. Check site:www.seobrien.com and it's the same story.
I really can't say for sure (who can?), but duplicate content isn't the main cause for the push into supplement index. Yes, it is one of the important factors, but if you have a large number of backlinks to a page (even one that is a complete duplicate), you can easily push it out of supplemental.
well hey, we are the on the same page then I misread your post. I thought it read "not at all caused by duplicate content". you can pretty do much anything with the right backlinks
Both sites are on separate servers, one in US and one in Canada, and the whois is different too. Site A is all hand coded HTML. Is PR4 with "technically" more backlinks than site B which is PR3. I suspect that on this coming PR Update that the PR4 is going to be gone because Google is only recognizing 4 links in Webmaster Tools. I was not following it closely, but it seems that over past few months Google was slowly dropping/ignoring all my backlinks, while at the same time slowly placing all my pages in Sup Index (home page too! ) I've dealt with supplemental issues before and getting a few more links to a page seems to work. But in this case I'm worried that spending $ on more links might be a waste. I just don't understand the disappearing backlinks. We're not talking about the usual up and down fluctuations here. Went from 400+ to only 4. Yahoo and MSN all see 400+ links
Identical Page titles on every page of a site can cause supplemental, even with unique copy on the page.
Well that is most certainly puzzling. I don't discount the possibility that it's soley due to be interpreted as duplicate content, but I still personally believe that possibility is quite low. The backlinks thing is REALLY weird. If duplicate content were the reason, it wouldn't make sense for them to disregard your valid backlinks. That would practically almost be crossing the line into censorship. People linked to your site because they liked, it caught their interest, whatever reason. If Google believes that there is something "wrong" with your site, they have no right to say "these linking sites don't know what they are talking about." The whole idea behind link popularity would be defeated. Don't disagree with that at all. I actually pointed that out to someone yesterday. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showpost.php?p=2796836&postcount=3